One of the photgraphers on Adorama’s channel has a show called You Keep Shooting. That advice worked rather well when I took Scarlett into the studio with me for a photo shoot that would be used for my Black and White Conversion Challenge. (While the videos are already live on Youtube, the blog post that ties it together has not yet been published) Scarlett tends to be a pretty awesome model for a four year old amateur. She was patient and took direction for about 10 minutes or so. Then she wanted to do her own thing. Mostly that involved jumping and dancing and asking me to photograph her doing it. I zoomed out to get more of her body on the jumps and in doing so ended up with the beauty dish in the frame. While it would be only of a medium difficulty to remove it in Photoshop or GIMP (and trivial to crop it out), I felt that it added to a feel of performance when combined with the red background. The only thing would have made it more perfect for that theme would have been if she’d been wearing a dress or tutu.

Yesterday Sam’s teeth started erupting - making him the earliest of the three kids to get their teeth and also explaining the last few days of insane amounts of drooling. (this was not a pre-published post)

(About this shirt my mom gave Scarlett)

Scarlett: what does this mean?

Eric: It means people will remember you.

Scarlett: Why does grandma want people to remember me?

Although, if you aren’t judgemental, I guess it’s a good thing it exists. I know some women (not Danielle, we both rarely drink alcohol) who had miserable pregnancies because they couldn’t drink. So at least this way if they want to drink now that the baby’s out, they can make sure the milk is alcohol-free.

One of the best parts of three year olds is their willingness to help. I will show this video to Scarlett when she denies ever being enthusiastic about helping us. She even dragged a stool over to be tall enough.

Some people still treat TV as if it’s the boob tube (that’s boob as in dummy, not breast). But Scarlett’s kid’s cartoons led her to learn some stuff that led to the following exchange:

Danielle (rhetorically): Why does this monkey have a frog on its head?

Eric: It’s Swedish. (The toy is from Ikea)

Danielle: What?

Scarlett: No, it’s symbiosis!

Eric: Symbiosis? (I wonder if she knows what it means) What does that mean?

Just playing with the idea of breaking up a video of an activity into different shots.

This summer she’s trying a lot of new spots, it seems.